Over the past several years, the amount of multimedia content available online has increased dramatically. With access to cheap storage and higher bandwidths, photo sharing sites and video sharing sites have become widely used. Sharing personal photos with families and friends through one of these photo sharing sites is now commonplace. The explosion in video sharing is not so much attributable to the sharing of personal video created by the user but the sharing of video created by another person that the user finds particularly funny, interesting or informative.
Video sharing is often done through e-mail. Typically, after viewing a video, the user inputs e-mail addresses of those persons with whom the user would like to share the video. In response, the video sharing site sends an e-mail to such persons with a hyperlink to the video. The person receiving the e-mail can access the hyperlink to view the video and share the video with other persons in the same manner. Video viewership can increase very rapidly in this manner.
A less intrusive way of sharing video is through a profile or landing page a user maintains at an online social network. When a user finds a video that is particularly funny, interesting or informative, the user features that video on his or her landing page at the online social network. As people visit the user's landing page at the online social network, they can watch the video from the user's landing page although the actual video feed is from a third party source.
As more and more users at online social networks feature videos and other multimedia content on their landing pages, the task of managing them has become a challenge to online social networks. One major reason for the difficulty in managing such multimedia content is that much of it are not stored locally by the online social networks but are streamed from servers that host the multimedia content when they are accessed for viewing.